A/N: It is an official fact that one could easily buy my everlasting love with good Slingshot/Jinmay romance/friendship fics (yay, Slingmay).
Artificial Sweetener
On a far-away planet a desolate, intense fight took place between the deranged leftovers of a genius scientist and his rebellious creation.
Somewhere, down along the lane of intense arch-rivalry, the senseless violence seemed to develop into a sort of everyday routine. Sure, it was an extremely dysfunctional routine of mechanic carnage, excessive destruction of the environment, and screaming death threats at the top of their lungs – they never claimed to have a healthy creator-creation relationship - but it was really all there was for them.
Maezono had nothing else left - with his body gone, and no allies to aid him, he only had his own insane mind for company and the fiery hatred to keep his frontal lobes warm at night.
Slingshot had nothing else to look forward to – he was a machine built to destroy, to tear apart, and maul, and win, and quickly move on to find the next victim to gift his forte for unrestrained hostility upon.
It was while he was exerting that precise speciality to yet another huge combat mecha bent on preparing him for the scrap yard that the routine was broken.
Slingshot was wielding his trademark energy weapons: he slung back and aimed for the joint between the enemy robot's head and torso. Onscreen and ready to fling himself ahead as a deadly full-body projectile at the pink dot—
Wait, what?
In front of him, and aggravatingly right in his line of target, a little pink doll grew in size until he could make out an unmistakably female android, flying in circles trying to keep out of the large combat robot's reach.
She was very pink. This place was going for more of a 'dark, desolate and gritty' vibe and so pink didn't quite fit in.
Whatever. She could be as pastel-coloured as she liked if she would just move – the enemy was distracted and its one most weak point was right there but she was apparently the sort of girl who keeps dangling around in places without realising it would be a good idea she got out of the way.
Not wanting to mirror her stupid behaviour, Slingshot flung himself at the intersection between the arm and the gargantuan pulse rifle it was waving around – sure, it was deficit at this point (he'd already lured it into wasting it all on rearranging the already sordid city-scape) but it still functioned just fine as an overly elaborate mallet and the depleted energy cores might still decide to explode on impact.
Using the basic force of momentum, Slingshot quickly relieved his enemy of its right appendage. It fell to the ground and whipped up several kilos of dust in which Slingshot hid while preparing to separate the head from the body since the girl had finally decided to get a move on.
Flying around the robot, she effectively divided its attention for a short while so that Slingshot could (gah, finally) get his move on and leave a gaping hole where the enemy's chest used to be. Sputtering and sparking, the foe fell over, reduced to glorified scrap metal.
Slingshot glared indifferently. Well, he wasn't getting up any time soon. Or ever. It had happened too many times for him to be disturbed by the fact he was essentially offing his next of kin (given that they wanted to destroy him he quickly passed on speculating on that. Besides, discussing morals was something humans did. When they were bored, or wanted to go to war, or something.)
He flew in closer and landed in front of the intruder, giving her a once over. Too human. Too pink. Too smiley.
"Distracting it - that was helpful. Even if you did get in my way," he said flatly.
She frowned. "Thanks, I guess. My name's Jinmay."
"Good for you. Just don't get in my way again."
But of course she did. And she had the gall to be nice about it too.
New everyday activities had been introduced instead of the usual 'see big thing, kill big thing, go contemplate your futile existence while waiting for another big thing to kill' schedule.
One of these included the wonders of forced small-talk:
"I've been around this quadrant before, you know, at an earlier time. I was searching for answers for very important questions and I was told that on this planet I'd find a trio of brilliant engineers specialising in robotics and dabbling in artificial intelligence. That they might provide the answers I was searching for."
"Not anymore."
"So I see. I never reached this place the first time around because of a run-in with the authorities of the Cheese Spit Mines of Leekubar Six; something to do with needing a sacrificial damsel for their annual brain cheese monster festival and I—uh, I really don't want to talk about, actually."
"I don't really want to know."
She seemed a bit offended by his blunt replies. She never said so – no, she was obviously too polite for that (a hopelessly human custom that only seemed to involve delaying actual interaction and wearing funny hats).
It was sort of weird insulting someone without meanwhile having to dodge a photon particle blast or a hugely disproportionate fist from an enemy combat mecha.
It didn't fit the routine.
"I found something."
And she kept mentioning it until he followed to see whatever prize she had in store for him.
It was a box.
A box made to persevere through the strain of time, through the beat of interstellar wars and nuclear attacks, through the brimstone and infernos of the Universe restarting itself.
And of course it was filled with comic books and candy. Because humans prioritized weirdly.
Jinmay started raiding the box for brightly coloured, plastic-wrapped pieces of happiness. Slingshot watched her plunder the box for a few moments before he asked her what she was making such a big deal for.
"You've never eaten chocolate before?" she asked sympathetically and – what the scrap was that pity?
"Do I have a mouth?" he replied sourly.
"Your sensors could take a sample and imitate the sensations—"
"Yeah, no. They can't. Why do humans eat that stuff so religiously – they don't need it."
"Well, that's the point of candy – it's a treat you don't really need. It's just sweet for the sake of having something sweet. Nice, yet unnecessary. I'm sorry you haven't had the chance to try it."
And she put down the candy, not wanting to eat it in front of him. Because she was nice like that.
Slingshot just kicked the box in reply.
It was a new routine. And whether it was superior in quality to the old one Slingshot honestly could not determine.
He now had to deal with her repeatedly talking to him about things of various importance ranging from inane to stupid and her trying to help him by aiding him in destroying more robots soldiers faster than ever; but in reality it resulted in more free time: an enemy he just didn't know how to battle.
She left at some point.
Because, as she said, it was evident that he didn't want her around.
And he didn't. Obviously.
So she left after enduring his verbal abuse and cold-shoulder-treatment for an indeterminate amount of time.
Whether it was a question of days or hours or just minutes she'd been around Slingshot couldn't say. His internal clock informed him of a string of numbers describing the lapse in time but somehow he felt that it possibly couldn't have been that short of a span.
The short time she'd spent pinking up the planet seemed infinitely, unbearably, short compared to the vast temporal oceans of animosity which seemed to be the only purpose of his future existence.
He found that he was experiencing what he could only describe as a continuous lapse in his memory circuits.
The imagery of her ridiculously girly pigtails gently bobbing up and down in rhyme with her laughter (which she would've burst into for seemingly no discernible reason other than she felt like it) kept distracting him at frankly inopportune times – such as when absolute focus was needed for ramming through the delicate machinery of the control brains of his robotic opponents instead of slamming against their heavy-plated armour and plopping to the ground like a bug squashed against a windscreen (and then the simile ended when the windscreen proceeded to laser the bug into oblivion).
Sometimes he found himself delegating RAM to wondering what sort of sensory input he might receive from chocolate. And not only did the blue robot now detest Maezono for betraying Akihuchi, but also found that he despised the man for never fitting the Prometheus 5 with the ability to sample and taste the sweeter, crispy, savoury and custard-filled aspects of life.
Sweet for the sake of sweet.
He wondered if in the future he might ever again be able to be annoyed by such an unnecessary luxury.
Slingshot also found himself pondering if he might have been able to do something akin to that if he'd just kept Jinmay around.
And he could have done, couldn't he? He could have just pretended to have listened to her one-sided conversations, or, even better, confess that while he wasn't listening to what she was saying, in particular, he liked it when she talked. He liked her voice, because it was part of the new routine, he liked her when she tried to cheer him up, because she saw him as something else than a mechanical bringer of death and destruction, because she reached out to him despite the fact he shrugged her off. Again and again and again.
Until she left.
For the first time, Slingshot tasted something.
It was oh so bittersweet.